#though given the amount of details to convey in these outfits to get across all the blue and turquoise/teal

[regallibellbright]

This week in Precure Color Chaos:

So a 20th anniversary artbook showing all the Cures by color came out and that means official designations for the last five years of Cures. Yellow, Orange, and Gold were all grouped together, so there is room to argue that Wing is yellow (he is not,) Soleil is orange (this is… a much, much harder question,) Yum Yum is orange (ditto,) or Sunshine is retroactively gold now that that’s a color (she’s sure as hell golder than Finale and that WOULD explain why gold is included with yellow.)

This, however, is overshadowed to me by the OTHER big Star Twinkle color sorting.

I present to you all the following:

Question: Which of these Cures is blue?

Answer: Neither of them. Milky, on the right, is officially green, so we expect turquoise to be classed as a shade of green going forward. Cosmo, on the left, is officially RAINBOW.

The implications of this are going to seriously reignite the Soleil yellow or orange debate because Yuni being Mihoshi Blue and Elena being Mihoshi Yellow no longer means quite as much when Cosmo is not officially blue, but also, this is hilarious to me.

[petersendjurhuus2-blog]

‘Red Dead Redemption 2' Is 1 Of The Most Ambitious Games Of The Existing Console

The split between what a game can provide you in its mechanics versus what it brings to the table in terms of story, artistry, and scope has never ever been far more pronounced than it is in Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar's epic prequel to its 1st spin of the lasso in 2010. Significantly of that also applies to the storytelling. Red Dead Redemption 2 starts out slow, and it has no troubles with taking its sweet time with items. It sets the pieces, moves them into position, and progressively accelerates. A slow paced story can usually be a deal breaker, but when that slow pace exists to enable every little Red Dead Redemption 2 download thing to be built up with perfection, it can be a potent point. Nothing at all ever feels rushed, and seldom does Red Dead Redemption 2 ever take a turn that feels unearned. It begins slow, yes, but it builds momentum continually, and as items move towards the ending (which alterations depending on your options as a player), they hold selecting up pace. By the end, it's virtually exhaustingly intense. If there's an problem, it is that Red Dead Redemption two skims more than some of its numerous intricate systems. There is a large amount in this game - from the way you keep your guns, to the way hunting for animal pelts is primarily how to download red dead redemprion 2 based on a three-tier high quality method. In the end, some things slip by you a small unnoticed - or you occasionally discover them overwhelming. In addition to the mechanics of numerous activities, you happen to be also presented with a handful of components of semi-realism you want to contend with. Mainly, you need to eat to refill your health, stamina, and Dead Eye potential "cores," which deplete over time. Eating also considerably or as well small final results in weight alterations and stat debuffs. Eating itself is not a issue, and neither is maintaining cores in common where i can download red dead redemption 2, but eating sufficient to preserve an average weight is intrusive despite experimenting with what and how typically I ate, I couldn't get Arthur out of the underweight range, and eating any much more frequently would be too time-consuming to justify. You never have to sleep (even though you can to pass time and refill your cores), and surviving hot or cold temperatures comes down to deciding on the proper outfit from your item wheel, so managing your weight sticks out as superfluous rather than conducive to immersion. Though the 1st game followed the story of one man, that's not the the case with Red Dead Redemption 2. Red Dead Redemption 2 plays like you have been dropped into the second season of an Old West Netflix series directed by Quentin Tarantino and created how to download red dead redemprion 2 by the Coen brothers. It's incredibly polished and wealthy, and the obsession with detail is clear, every single scene making the game globe and characters leap off the screen. Comparably there are more info here or otherwise subtle meters that dictate something from "honor" (how individuals react to you) to bonuses like a lot more loot, but they're not clear. Red Dead Redemption 2 goes for the genuine undertaking of the facilitation of bromances with the camp program (which has flashes of Final Fantasy XV or the droves of connection red dead redemption 2 download-centric JRPGs in recent memory) and backs up those relationships with sturdy mission style. Much more usually than not you happen to be going to be saddling up with pals or new acquaintances, fighting, or operating alongside them. Big swaths of the story unfold this way. Even though you go on long rides across the nation, characters will speak about virtually almost everything: the struggles of the gang, individual relationships, future dreams, the continual encroachment of civilization. These moments would seem Red Dead Redemption 2 Download tedious if they weren't so properly-completed. I never ever got bored of obtaining to know these characters even though taking in the beautiful scenery: snowy white fields or wide open plains, clear blue skies or dark ones lighting up with crackles of lighting. Indeed, the Van der Linde gang are a colourful bunch. There is a lot much more dialogue here than in earlier Rockstar titles, and it functions wonders for the game's cast. They're all provided ample opportunity to express themselves given that the majority of primary missions have you band with each other with at least one of your partners in crime, and every person bounces off every single other specifically effectively. Whats much more, the writing's as sharp as ever, matched only by prime where i can download red dead redemption 2 notch voice acting. Nonetheless, it really is the path that really caught our eye. Rockstar has usually tried to recreate the type of dramatic shots that you'd find in a movie - the sort that heighten atmosphere and sell character interactions - and Red Dead Redemption 2 pulls them off better than any of the developer's preceding games. In short, this is a single of the most engaging stories that you are going to find on Sony's program. As with the initial Red Dead, the world's fictional duality puts the story in a gently abstracted space that makes it possible for the writers to comment on American history with out worrying overmuch about historical accuracy. Had been Red Dead Redemption two loaded with cheap satire and eye-rolling commentary, that method where i can download red dead redemption 2 would come across as a frustrating bit of ass-covering. Fortunately, thanks to the game's strong script, it instead frees the game up to paint in strokes broad sufficient to capture the oppressive corruption that continues to be one of our nation's defining elements. On a technical level Red Dead Redemption II is beyond reproach (except for characters' hair, oddly, which is usually distractingly poor) and in these terms possibly the most impressive video game we've ever observed. Critiquing the storytelling is more hard but it's clearly borne of similarly unrestrained ambitions. And however the way it really is conveyed is quite classic. In truth Red Dead Redemption 2 download, the game as a whole could practically be accused of getting old-fashioned, in spite of its state-of-the-art presentation. Reduce scenes are frequent, though normally shorter and less self-indulgent than in the final game, but they still work in the identical nicely-established way as any other game. Hands-on impressions this week include much more game time with Forza, Forza and much more Forza, Stuart gets to grips with Dead Cells and Antony requires on an epic voyage in Sea of Thieves. Plus Stuart dusts off his PSVR and provides Moss and Transference a whirl. Red Dead Redemption two Red Dead Redemption 2 Download is friction defined. Will Red Dead Redemption 2 be an additional five-star classic from Rockstar? Express On the internet will have a round-up of the evaluation scores when they go live.

[fearthepandas]

here’s the draft of my video game essay if anyone wants to read it (or help edit)

kay two notes, this is a script for a video, so places where there are weird notes are because those are for the video part and also I'm trying to cut maybe a minute out of it, so if you want to help edit it, do it ruthlessly

Costuming is important to games. There are some who knock it out. You often end up seeing those looks over and over again at conventions, during Halloween, even with enthusiastic kids with chill parents. Those looks don’t happen by accident. Of course they don't. They are carefully crafted by people trained to do so: a costume designer. They aren’t often considered as a typical and integral part of the game development process as other positions. But their efforts enhance the game world while also going largely unnoticed.

Take this example. I'll make a guess: you aren't assuming that that guy in your class with the boat shoes and “Vineyard Vines” shirt is trying to say something in the way he dresses. But, intentional or not, he is. At the very least, he’s telling you what social groups he belongs to. But he could be telling you what he values, what his socioeconomic status is, what his gender his, what the weather is like, and more. All this happens through what he wears. Clothing and textiles have huge capacities to convey information. And they belong to a language that a lot of us can understand. You know, since most of us exist in a world where the majority of people around us are wearing clothing. And luckily for creators, this language isn’t limited to the real world.

In a book, the author has to describe what a character is wearing in enough detail for the reader to understand the situation, and that can take quite a bit of time, or paragraphs, to do. The color and texture and shape of someone’s clothes can be hard to describe when a lot of people don’t know the words used to describe fabrics. In a more visual medium, that message may take equally as long to create. But the audience receives that message in a fraction of the time. We don’t have to know the words. We only have to be able to understand what we see. A flowy dress is a flowy dress. Dirty clothes look like dirty clothes. Belts are belts. Even if we don’t quite know what they’re doing…. (Kingdom Hearts) This is a huge storytelling advantage for costume design.

When video games were first appeared in the 1970s, game hardware was more like our modern calculators than our TVs and consoles. Technology improved over the next decade, but there were still massive limitations in what developers could actually achieve. And this forced them to get creative in addressing a key question. How do you make a recognizable character in as few pixels as possible?

For Mario, who first showed up in Donkey Kong in 1981, the designers made particular decisions which lead to him looking the way he does today. He wore a hat so that animators didn’t have to try to animate his hair and a mustache so that they didn’t have to animate a mouth. And those iconic overalls exist to help the player know where his torso ended and his arms began. These were practical choices. And they have completely shaped the most iconic character and franchise of video game history.

This is a novelty born out of necessity, though. This isn’t how most characters are designed. Characters don’t end up looking how they do by accident. And that’s when costume designers become so important. Costume designers put an incredible amount of thought and time into designing a character’s look.

“When you’re designing anything that’s based in a particular locale or time period (even if you’re not, really), research lends an invaluable legitimacy and depth to your design; the real world is generally way more interesting than what we can come up with on a blank sheet of paper… It’s impossible to recreate the variety and cultural context of a time period out of whole cloth, so you might as well lean on the resources history has been so generous as to provide for us.” Claire Hummel

Characters have to be unique, identifiable, well-suited for the genre and setting they’re in. And if they’re not, there has to be reasons that will tell us something that's 180* different about that character.

Unfortunately, most of us aren’t spending a lot of time trying to “read” a character’s outfit. We may be actually looking at it for the entire course of the game, but might not consider what it’s supposed to mean. It’s an invisible communication. We get the basic message and never realize there was a message at all. The hours and hours the designers poured into writing the perfect message gets forgotten, shoved into the bottom of the pile. And it shouldn’t.

We tend to think that costumes that look more like our everyday outfits aren’t as planned or as valuable as costumes that are more… ambitious. When costuming falls into this category, it is essentially invisible to us. This phenomenon isn’t limited to video games either. Every winner for the costume design Oscar over the past few decades has gone to either a fantasy or period based flick. But there is no less thought put into designing Franklin’s (GTA) look than there went into making Siegmeyer’s (Dark Souls).

Games wouldn’t exist like they do if designers weren’t putting the effort and consideration that they do. And games are better for it! “The movement and texture of clothing really adds to the realism of the game. Often I look at games and everything seems so flat.” Lyn Paolo

Designers do research, and sketching, and tests, and review, and then possibly more research, and sketching, and final drafts, all until the developers find a design (or designs) they want to use.

And they have to nail it, or the effectiveness of the whole game can be put at risk. “When the design feels inconsistent with the world, I’m distracted. Fiction bears the burden of being hyper real. To make a story we know isn’t true convincing, it has to avoid plot holes and take place in a consistent world. The moment that façade is shattered, players may have a harder time staying engrossed in the game.” (JennyJackProse) This is a sentiment shared by a lot of players. The anachronism is jarring. So designers have to make sure they put the extra work in to make a design feel appropriate. And, a lot of the time, they don’t even know which game they are designing for when they start their work. Lyn Paolo works on shows like “Scandal” and “Shameless” and also a little known game called GTA V. She created all  her designs for the games based solely on design boards given to her by the developers. She had no title, no series name, absolutely nothing. And she helped build a cohesive, diverse world.

Games have come astronomically far over the past four decades. They look more and more real every year and try to achieve bigger and bigger goals. Designers these days aren’t as limited by technology in how they can make a character look. Costume design for video game characters these days is almost identical to the design done for TV shows, plays, and movies. In fact, there are plenty of costume designers who have worked across these mediums, like Lyn Paolo.

Designers these days aren’t free from limitations, of course. Those restrictions have just taken on a different shape. Designers still have to consider setting, genre and everything else taken into consideration when planning a character’s look. The major issue is that there isn’t enough money to achieve everything they may want to do.

The cost of games continues to skyrocket as the visual fidelity does. And a lot of consumers have decided that they aren’t willing to pay more than the standard $60 price tag established when games were much cheaper to produce. I honestly can’t blame the standard consumer. That's considering that I am a broke college student who might be able to buy only one full-priced game a year. There are competing drives here that are going to limit what designers and developers are going to achieve. Which is going to force creative solutions in new ways.

Think about how many games that have come out in the past few years where you never see another person on screen. (Show Firewatch, Amnesia, Portal, Layers of Fear, FNaF) There’s quite a few isn’t there? Designing a believable human model is hard, and things that are difficult often end up costing more money in the end. So a lot of developers have decided to nix the presence of another person entirely to cut costs. This isn’t great for video game costume designers, but it's understandable from the developer's perspective. And It’s unfortunate that this critical aspect of storytelling is going to be present only in the biggest Triple A games . Which it might considering the standoff over pricing.

A good game obviously doesn’t need great costume design, or even other characters at all, but it can take a game from good to phenomenal. The world becomes lived in, diverse, maybe a little broken. The playable character isn’t some empty shell we inhabit. They’re someone with a personality, drives and faults we may or may not share. They cease to be Mary Stus and Sues and become actual beings.

We should make sure to take a second and really appreciate the work that costume designers do and they’ve contributed to our favorite games. Go on. Hug your local game designer.

[logh-icebergs]

Episode 7: Iserlohn Taken!

May 14th, 796/487. Infiltrating Iserlohn fortress in the guise of a damaged Imperial ship, the Rosen Ritter swiftly overpower the control room. The quick thinking of one Imperial soldier temporarily locks them out of the fortress computer, forcing Yang to stall for time while Schenkopp and co. rush around Iserlohn kicking ass and taking names—names and computer passwords, I guess, since they unlock the system and allow Yang’s ship to dock. The Thor Hammer makes quick work of a large chunk of the Imperial fleet, although Oberstein flits away like the cockroach he is.

Technical Aside: Character Redraws

As I mentioned, when LoGH was released on DVD the episodes were remastered. By and large this involved evening out the colors, fixing the lighting when it was too washed out, sharpening lines, etc., and it’s beautifully done and deserves a lot of credit for making this show such an aesthetic joy to watch.

However. For reasons lost to the sands of time (at least, unknown to us) some scenes were entirely reanimated, primarily in the first and early second seasons. These redraws go beyond the touchups of other episodes—sometimes in ways that have little consequence (changing backgrounds, slightly different positioning of the characters in the scene), but sometimes in ways that significantly alter the emotions conveyed on the characters’ faces. This poses a problem for us, since the whole thesis of this project is that the animators of LoGH intentionally conveyed a ton of important information about emotions, thoughts, and relationships of the characters specifically via the details of the expressions and body language.

As an example of an inconsequential but unfortunate change, they made this random dude’s hair way more boring. Poor guy.

The original here conveys much more character though the body language.

Our policy will be to base our analysis off of the original animation when we believe there’s a real difference. In these cases we’ll give a heads up and include plenty of screenshots for those who don’t have access to the laserdiscs on which it was first released. Episode 7 is one of the handful of episodes that was actually about 90% redrawn, including a few key character moments, so in some of the discussion below I include both versions to illustrate the differences. In the future we may not even show the comparison, but just analyze the original animation. It’s annoying that the version on hidive is the redrawn version, yes, but these are the hurdles one must contend with in pursuit of true LoGH scholarship…

Believe it or not, changing poor Julian’s outfit and pose here is not the most egregious example of straightwashing in the redraws—we’ll come to that later in the season.

Ideals, Pragmatism, and Tea

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s get into the substance of the episode. One main theme that’s woven throughout the entire Iserlohn mission (dipping back into episode 6 as well) is Yang’s distaste for the abstract ideals that are commonly invoked as justification for the continuing war and destruction. We saw this a bit in his reactions to Trunicht’s speech in episode 3, and we see it again when he addresses the newly-formed 13th fleet:

(From episode 6.)

I love the tea speech. While at one level it’s humorous—silly Yang, so awkward and out of his depth giving a speech to thousands of people—it’s also a really pithy expression of Yang’s priorities. In two sentences Yang undermines the fundamental concept of this war: that they’re fighting for an ideal, for honor or love of their country or hatred of the empire. Circumstances have led the people in this fleet to find themselves facing a battle, and given that reality, the motivation he offers them for fighting is that living is preferable to death. And not just living, but living pleasurably. For Yang it’s drinking good tea that pops into his head, but it’s not a leap to substitute a more general idea of tangible, visceral experience of the world: being alive to do the things that make life enjoyable.

Yang believes that life is the sum of choices and experiences, and he hates the war not just because of the unnecessary death, but also because of the way it cuts off people’s choices and individual agency—his own, for example, and as he sees it, Julian’s.

Never mind that Julian claims to *want* to fight; in Yang’s view Julian’s agency is an illusion since it’s so shaped by societal forces. Hmm, projecting much, Yang? We’ll come back to this, of course. (From episode 6.)

Toward the end of this episode we see again how frustrated Yang gets with rigid adherence to ideals of honor at the expense of actual lives. We saw this in episode 1 when his commanding officer refused to abandon the already-defeated fourth fleet; here Admiral Seeckt of the Imperial Iserlohn fleet refuses Yang’s offer to let them withdraw, instead responding with haughty phrases about the honor and glory of soldiers. Yang’s reaction here is the single biggest difference between the original animation and the redraws, so I’ll show both here:

The redraw exaggerates Yang’s reaction in a way that feels inconsistent with his character. He is angry here, yes, but the composed, sad anger of the original fits him more than the seething, almost explosive rage of the redraw.

Also he is just so much more beautiful in the original, damn.

Yang’s hatred of the rhetoric of war is palpable here, and his reaction—to concentrate fire on the flagship—accomplishes the dual goals of allowing the rest of the fleet to go ahead and withdraw, and eliminating the Admiral whose attitude he found so harmful.

But despite hating the war and wanting it to end, Yang accepted this mission; and when Schenkopp grills him about it in episode 6 we get insight into his specific goals.

Yang’s pacifism is of a highly pragmatic flavor: As a historian he views cycles of war as inevitable and lacks the hubris/ambition to think that anything he does will change that in a lasting way. But the value he places on individual freedom and self-determination means that he sees full surrender to the autocratic government of the Empire as worth avoiding, and his hope in taking Iserlohn is that it might be the bargaining chip they need to conclude a peace treaty that would allow the Alliance government to remain independent.

His desire for peace is intimately tied in with his desire to leave the military and go back to the life he finds more enjoyable: drinking tea and studying history. And indeed when the mission succeeds, he initially attempts to do exactly that, going so far as to hand over a letter of resignation to Admiral Sitolet.

This is obviously a huge turning point for Yang. Nothing is actually stopping him from resigning here; it was his plan from the beginning of the mission and he has the power to do it. But Sitolet, who was his instructor back at the military academy so has known him for a long time, knows exactly how to play him. 

While Yang scorns the typical lofty ideals that his government puts forward to justify the continued death toll of the war, he believes deeply enough in the value of individual human lives that Sitolet’s guilt trip works on him. He can’t quite bring himself to put his own aspirations above the futures of the people in his fleet when faced with what amounts to a threat on their lives. Yang has served under other commanders and seen them, for example, advocate suicide attacks in order to play a game of attrition; Sitolet’s words are not abstract to him. While he urged his soldiers to fight so they don’t die, he himself feels the burden of fighting so that other people don’t die, so that other people have the choices he’s turning down himself.

I introduced Yang as a man of paradoxes, and we see that here: his belief in the ideals of freedom and self-determination pushing him to stay on this path he doesn’t feel suited for.

Oberstein

We already met Paul von Oberstein when he accosted Kircheis in episode 4. (In fact he’s been around lurking in the background since “My Conquest.”) Here I would just like to point out that Oberstein is set up as a clear parallel/foil to Yang. Remember in episode 1 when Yang is the only one to see through Reinhard’s plan but his commanding officers won’t listen until it’s too late? Oberstein plays exactly that role here, seeing right through Yang’s delay tactic of pretending to control the weapons of Iserlohn before they actually did, but Seeckt refuses to listen to his logic.

(Yang shots from episode 1.)

Like Yang, Oberstein is deeply pragmatic and keenly intelligent. His vibe here comes across like “what if Yang but no soul?” We’ll keep an eye on the parallels and contrasts between them as we get to know them better. (Well, get to know Yang better anyway; can anyone ever really be said to “know” the enigma that is Oberstein…?) 

The Rosen Ritter

In case you thought the Rosen Ritter were all sexy swagger and no action, here we get to see them actually doing their thing—hacking people to death with battle-axes. This fight sequence is beautifully choreographed, incredibly badass, and starkly brutal to watch. 

Yang may be sitting out in his flagship doing his best to craft a strategy that minimizes loss of life, but that doesn’t mean much to these soldiers who are sacrificed to his plan. Again, war at all levels of zoom.

Stray Tidbits

I can’t resist ranting a bit more about how much they change Yang when they redraw him. Fortunately it’s pretty rare—we won’t see redrawn!Yang much more until episode 39. But just...why...did they change the shape of his face and make his skin so red? Why? Original!Yang is so beautiful and sad and sleepy. 

This scene makes me crack up every time. Between this and the waitress scene in the last episode we’re amassing quite a “Blumhart waves awkwardly at random women” collection.